Cycling the distance with Axis

Axis cameras help safeguard competitors and spectators at the 2015 UCI Road World Championships in Richmond, Virginia

Event photos courtesy of Jesse Peters. “The 32x optical zoom on the Axis PTZ cameras was really impressive. We could zoom in on people three or four blocks away and identify who they were. Given their high resolution, we didn’t need to put a camera on every street corner.” Derek Andresen, Deputy Coordinator, Office of Emergency Management, City of Richmond.

Mission

When the city of Richmond won the bid to host the 2015 Union Cyclist International (UCI) Road World Championships, it knew it needed to draw on a host of resources – local, regional, state and federal – to ensure the 10-day event would go off without incident. The plan called for 24/7 situational awareness of race circuits that would be changing configurations on a daily basis. The goal was to establish a single unified command center where video feeds from the city cameras, motorcycle and helicopter cameras from the Virginia State Police and the FBI, as well as all of the raw footage from broadcast cameras covering the event could all be streamed. In addition, it would be stored and remotely accessed through a secure virtual private network (VPN) at any hour of the day or night by authorized users across multiple agencies.

Solution

Building on the city’s existing video management system (VMS) platform, the event managers turned to Johnson Controls, an integrated security management partner, to help incorporate over 450 cameras from various agencies into the single unified command center. In addition to the city’s fiber backbone, the solution included two different wireless mesh node networks feeding into the system as well as two Axis video encoders to pull in the video feeds from the dozens of broadcast cameras covering the races.

Result

With all the situational awareness provided by the Axis cameras and other IP cameras temporarily integrated into the unified command center, all of the different jurisdictions were able to remotely access any of the live cameras and archived footage on demand through the VPN. They could seamlessly track the movements of specific individuals and suspicious packages and even reunite lost parents and children. This preparation aided in the success of the 10-day event, which concluded without a single major incident.